Now that you've created your first model, you'll probably want to try rendering it. Your first render, with a single light source and only nine faces, should finish quickly. However, as your 3D scenes become more complex, you'll find that rendering can take a long time.

In this module, you'll render your quickie model and save the result in various file formats. You'll also learn how to aim cameras and create lamps.

Navigate to the directory (folder) where you wrote the file, by clicking LMB on directory names in the File window. (Clicking on ".." will take you up one level.)

Click LMB on the name of the file you wrote.

Click LMB on the "Open File" button. As soon as the operation is complete, the window will revert back to its former type.

Press F12 or select Render → Render Image. This opens the Image Editor so you can watch the render progress.

If F12 is in use by the window manager...

With the new Apple keyboard, use Fn + F12 to avoid the Mac Dashboard.

With Macintosh OS X 10.5, use Alt + Fn + F12 .

With Gnome, use Alt + F12 to avoid the Gnome Search Dialog.

You can stop a render in progress by pressing Esc any time when the render window has the focus. Bear in mind that this will stop the rendering of the current frame and abandon any partial results; pressing F12 will start rendering the image from the beginning again.

By default, pressing F12 will switch to the UV/Image Editor window, and show you your render there. You can switch back to the 3D view with F11 . Pressing F11 in the 3D view will switch you to the UV/Image Editor window without redoing the render—you will simply see the same image as last time.

Blender offers a choice of different rendering engines for producing images. The menu for selecting from these appears in the Info window (the thin one that contains the menu bar at the top of the default layout). In most of these tutorials, you will leave this choice set at Blender Render. But it is worth knowing what other choices are available:

Blender Render—the oldest renderer, commonly known as the Blender Internal renderer. Built into Blender right from its early days. Can still produce good results with the right tricks, but considered by the Blender developers to be antiquated and not worthy of continuing development.

Blender Game—this is the renderer used by the Blender Game Engine. Designed to be fast enough for interactive use in a game, which means there are limitations in the quality of renders it produces. You also use this renderer to create rigid-body physics simulations.

The top panel under the Render tab in the Properties window shows 3 buttons and a menu. The first button renders a single frame, equivalent to F12 . The other two buttons are more relevant to animations.

The “Display:” menu controls what happens when you press F12 : the default “Image Editor” causes the 3D view to be switched to the UV/Image Editor showing the rendered image. “Full Screen” causes the UV/Image Editor display to take over the entire screen, while “New Window” makes it appear in a separate OS/GUI window (similar to how older versions of Blender used to work). Finally, “Keep UI” causes no changes to your window layout at all; you have to explicitly bring up the Image Editor with F11 to see the rendered image.

You can control the size of image that Blender creates when rendering. This is specified in the “Dimensions” panel under Render properties. Apart from the menu at the top, the settings in this panel are grouped into two columns:

The column on the left controls settings for a single image.

The column on the right specifies additional settings for rendering a whole sequence of images as part of an animation. These settings will be discussed later.

At the upper left, under “Resolution:”, we have the dimensions in pixels of the image (the default settings are 1920×1080 as shown in the screenshot), plus an additional scale factor slider below (showing 50% by default). With these settings, the image will actually be rendered at (1920×50%)×(1080×50%) = 960×540. Having the scale factor is a convenience; rendering smaller, lower-quality images is faster, which speeds things up when you are initially working on your model, but of course you want full quality for the final result. Instead of mentally having to work out numbers for initial- versus final-quality renders, you can simply set the resolution to the full final quality, and use the scale factor to reduce this to, say, 50% or 25% for interim work, and then set it to 100% for the final output.

You set the format and location for saving rendered images in the “Output” panel under the Render properties.

In current versions of Blender, the default format for saving rendered images is PNG. This is a lossless format which has the option for alpha transparency (which means the sky background is replaced by transparent pixels—enabled by clicking the “RGBA” button). This is a good format if you intend to do further work with the image (e.g. in an image editor like Gimp or Photoshop), but the files can be large.

JPEG is a lossy image format, which means it throws away information that the human eye doesn’t see. This produces much smaller files than PNG, and is adequate if you just want to upload the render directly for use in a Web page or other such document, but is not the best choice if you intend to do further processing of the image. It also doesn’t support alpha transparency.